As a social historian specializing in community studies, I am often asked to do media interviews after catastrophes or significant accidents. These tragedies can profoundly impact the social, economic, and historical fabric, altering lives, historic buildings, landmarks, and artifacts.
Mike Dixon TV interview on Station WJZ in Baltimore
This was the case this week. After a three-alarm fire destroyed a 170-year-old hotel in Elkton on Sunday, May 21, 2023. WJZ-TV Baltimore asked me to provide context around the landmark’s story, discuss how things have changed over the centuries, and comment on the impact of the destructive fire for the interview.
Once located on the main thoroughfare between Philadelphia and Baltimore, the Howard Hotel was an anchor in downtown Elkton for generations. It was a popular destination for travelers, families, and locals- a gathering place for generations.
The Northeastern Maryland landmark bustled with activity as waitresses served fine meals, bartenders dispensed drinks, and overnight guests booked comfortable rooms. This was long before Interstates and dual highways bypassed the town center, and hotel chains sprouted up along those new roads. In that earlier age, traveling salesmen, families making their way up or down the east coast, and others passing this way came right down Elkton’s Main Street, formerly Route 40.
The Howard Hotel was more than just a place to stay. It was a gathering place for the town. People met here for celebrations and to catch up with friends and neighbors.
Now a place that has anchored downtown since before the Civil War and prospered under the guidance of generations of hotelkeepers and tavern owners is gone.
In the 1920s, traffic flows through downtown Elkton on the Philadelphia Road. The Howard Hotel is in the background. (Source: Evening Bulletin, Philadelphia)
A house was damaged in the explosion. Source: Greenwood A Delaware Town from the Collection of the Greenwood Library
Recently I have been researching a deadly Delaware tragedy that spurred a vice president of the Pennsylvania Railroad to push for national safety transportation regulations. Following several accidents involving powerful explosives, including a catastrophic one in Greenwood, DE, the Bureau of Explosives was created under the American Railway Association.
The Sussex County disaster occurred over a hundred years ago, on December 2, 1903. During a blinding snowstorm, two trains collided in the center of the town of 367 people. One pulling a lethal cargo of dynamite and naphtha exploded, the blast and fire severely damaging the Sussex County community of 367 people.
Because of the growing number of catastrophes, James McCrea, who would become the eighth president of the Pennsylvania Railroad in 1907, urged carriers to adopt regulations to promote the safe transportation of explosives. The Bureau of Explosives (BOE) was created under the American Railway Association in 1907. With a chemical laboratory and 16 inspectors, the BOE immediately took the lead in inspecting shipments, encouraging improvements in shipping techniques, and developing rules that formed the basis of modern regulations of hazardous shipments.
Throughout the remainder of McCrea’s life, he had vivid recollections of the deadly detonations at Greenwood and elsewhere, which “had caused the death of many people, injury to many others, and had cost the Pennsylvania railroad many thousands of dollars.” Twenty-seven years later at the annual congress of the National Safety Council in Chicago in 1930, the tragedy was still being discussed in the official proceedings.
Having incidentally heard of the Greenwood Delaware Railroad Disaster in a few widely scattered secondary sources over the years, I wanted to better establish the broad framework and narrative of what appeared to be a major catastrophe in rural Delaware at the top of the 20th century. But there was little material conveniently available, and a Google search turned up only one hit. a genealogy website that had abstracted some information from newspapers.
So with my interest sparked and my research question framed, it was time to launch an investigation. Naturally, being a curious type, this is the kind of work I enjoy doing as I start a new study and begin my search for evidentiary fragments from the largely forgotten past.
My first step is always a review of the historical literature. This enables me to see what has already been done, and that often yields powerful results. But in the case of Greenwood, there wasn’t much secondary or primary material easily available.
My second step is to visit the community for a field observation as I look at the intersection of the present with the past. Surviving traces of earlier times exist, and exploring the built and natural environment facilitates understanding.
As I delve deeper into the past from that point, I move into archival research and interviews. Depending on the purpose of the study, this may include a wide range of materials — written, printed, or digital. The search for physical records includes letters, newspapers, diaries, photographs, maps, and much more One seldom knows where the information will be discovered as you start on the trail to find clues to the past.
While much of the material will be found in libraries, archives, special collections repositories, and local government offices, it usually is far from obvious where your data will come from. There are private papers in homes ranging from notes and letters to entries scribbled in diaries. Sometimes there are typed manuscripts containing memories of the community’s elders, but tracking these down means poking around to make contacts in the place you are visiting, as that material is often in basements, vaults, closets, and attics.
It also means leveraging unconventional techniques as I make my interest widely known in the community. That process usually begins with the reference librarian or the local community historian. Still, it also means visiting the barber shop, town hall, police station, tavern, and church. And it often calls for a visit to the nursing or retirement home.
Along the way, you collect your evidence, and the time will eventually arrive to try to fit the puzzle together by placing material into a pattern, which allows for the creation of a coherent narrative.
For the Greenwood disaster, this is still a work in progress, but as I continue, I will share thoughts on additional resources I come up with along the way.
